So okay, I ooh’d and ahh’d at the glam gowns and oh so trendy tuxes at the Oscars. What size are those girls? Zeros? Subzeros? (No, that’s a refrigerator…) But the numbers that really got my red carpet cheers were 62, 74 and 89. 62 would be the age of “Aviator’s” Martin Scorsese. 74 is the age of Oscar winner Clint Eastwood. 89 is the age of “Million Dollar Baby” production designer Henry Bumstead.
And while we’re on a roll, Michelangelo was sculpting up until a week before he died at eighty-nine, Albert Schweitzer was tending to the lepers at Lambarene at ninety, and Hillary Clinton, at 58, is still years away from BEGINNING the much talked-about (and controversial) possible couple of terms as president.
Try telling any of these folks that the reason you’re not pursuing your dream, not taking the risk of getting out of old ruts and trying something new, can’t get taken seriously because of your age is a valid excuse!
In the words of Betty Friedan: there “is the need for the people indubitably living with new vitality through their sixties, seventies, eighties to use those evolving abilities in society—and society’s need to use their wisdom and larger vision and truth-telling to confront its own problems…” Ooh! Ahh!
Carol Orsborn